Google says it may have overestimated blockage of services in China

Following a report by Google that its search and other services were "fully blocked" in China — triggering an international flurry of news stories — Google said late Thursday that its automated systems might have exaggerated the size of the problem.

"Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it's possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage," Jill Hazelbaker, Google's director of corporate communications, told the Mercury News. "That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally."

Hazelbaker noted that the automated status report is not a real-time tool, meaning Google assesses the state of its services in China only once a day, generally in the evening Pacific time.

The report that Google search was blocked sparked global coverage. Just three weeks ago, China granted Google a license to continue operating. That license was in question after Google in January said it would stop censoring search results, triggering an angry reaction from Chinese officials. Google later tried to end the stalemate over search censorship by automatically redirecting Chinese users from its censored google.cn site to its uncensored search engine in Hong Kong, google.com.hk.

Advertisement

However, after talks with the Chinese government, Google announced in June it would stop automatically redirecting users to the Hong Kong site, although users could still click on a link at google.cn to access the uncensored Hong Kong site.

Google's automated daily report on its services in China for July 29 apparently incorrectly suggested that the government interference was the worst the company had encountered since the company's confrontation with Chinese officials began. The report said that Google's search, ads and mobile services were "fully blocked," while other services including Image search and News, were partially blocked. Gmail was the only service that Google said was operating without restriction.